“The alchemists disappeared overnight,” Montfre said. “We were in an old abandoned Estate on the edge of the Middle Kingdom at the time, and Inyene kept everyone in their own halls. One for the guards, one for the alchemists, one for the servants and so on.”
Just like she keeps the Daza in their warehouses now? I grimaced. She thought about people like they were sacks of grain. Keep them here, bring them out when you need to use them, put the leftovers back again.
“I had been sent into the hills with a couple of Inyene’s guards to harvest supplies for my work, it was an overnight mission, but when I got back the next morning the alchemists’ hall was empty. But not of their equipment,” Montfre said ghoulishly. “Only their clothes, their most personal belongings, the alchemists themselves had vanished! I should have seen it at the time for what it was: No alchemist will ever leave their refractors and magnifiers and mortars and half a hundred other tools behind!”
I shuddered at the mystery of what must have happened to them as Montfre continued. “She started to trial my prototypes on newer, dog-sized mechanical dragons that she had me create for her. I had found a way to use the Earth lights to harness the residual etheric vibrations of matter,” he said, his voice speeding up a little.
“The what?” I said, before a feeling of fire raged through me, like an inferno. It was Ymmen of course.
“The Songs,” the black dragon hissed, and his tail lashed against the tower roof – causing several of the opposite battlement stones to crack and chip.
“I didn’t know it would be so awful!” Montfre cried out at the black dragon’s apparent outrage. “Truly, I didn’t. I had discovered that all matter – all earth, rocks, stones, trees, scales – it had a sort of energy. And the Earth lights naturally concentrated it. Once I knew that, it was a simple thing to tune those Earth lights to only capture the energy of the dragon scales that Inyene had been collecting.”
Montfre’s voice broke as he sobbed, and I saw just how upset he really was. “Inyene needed a way to control the toys, she said. So, I made her the scepter, which allowed her to animate all of the mechanical creations, so long as they had Earth lights and dragon scales on them.”
The young man looked at me with haunted eyes. “Believe me, I would do anything to undo what I did.”
He would? Now was my chance. “Help me,” I said, “Help my people escape.” Montfre looked at me seriously, and we held each other’s gaze for a long moment – but then he nodded.
“Can it be undone?” I asked immediately.
Montfre wiped a hand over his face. “I’ve thought about it often, but I’ve never found the perfect equation. The problem is, that without my staff…” He sounded lost.
“Why do you need a staff? Is it because of the chains?” I asked, though he looked perfectly capable of walking to me.
“Mages need a focus for their power. In ancient times, a mage was often one who was bonded with a dragon, but I have never bonded, and so my magic is erratic and unpredictable. Inyene broke my last staff so that I couldn’t destroy her work. As soon as I realized – almost six years ago – that she was building an army of monsters, I tried to burn my research and destroy my workshop. She stopped me with the power of the scepter that I had made for her. She broke my staff and imprisoned me here.”
He's a mage. And all he needs is a staff! My mind was a whirr of possibilities. “Look, Montfre – I will get you that staff! Look at Ymmen; look at how powerful he is!” I was saying excitedly. “Between us, with your power and this dragon – if we could even get Abioye to let us into the keep then we could steal the scepter!”
Montfre seemed to take interest for a moment, but then his eyes dropped as he sighed deeply.
“You see, I want to, but… you have no idea just how…” the mage searched for the right word, “cold Inyene is,” he settled for.
She doesn’t know how fierce I can be! My thoughts crackled, but Montfre was like a hurt animal. He was cautious. Wary. He needed to lose his pain and fear of Inyene before he would fully commit.
“It came from her childhood, I think,” Montfre mused. “Both she and Abioye did not grow up as rich or as powerful as they are now. They were orphaned when Inyene was just thirteen, and Abioye was only a toddler. That’s why he’s so loyal to her – she’s the only mother he’s ever had.”
“Inyene was forced to take her young brother and herself into an alms house,” Montfre said.
“An alms house?” I asked. I’d never heard of such a thing.
Montfre looked surprised at this, but he explained. “Well, alms houses were meant to be places of charity, to help those in need be useful and get back on their feet, but really, they had become debtors’ prisons. Anyone who was unlucky enough to end up there became the slaves of any merchant or workshop owner or lord who wanted to hire them.”
“So that’s where she got the idea for her mines,” I said, mostly to myself, and if Montfre noticed, I couldn’t tell.
“Abioye says that he doesn’t remember his childhood, and I often wonder if that is the truth or a lie that he has told himself,” Montfre said, his voice low. “They stayed there for only four years, until Inyene took her then seven-year-old brother and fled. They traveled to Torvald, living on the streets, amongst thieves and pickpockets until Inyene found a way to claw herself and Abioye out of their tragedy.”
I was rapt at the story, although it gave me the chills to think of it. I had come to regard the cities of the west with suspicion a long time before this – but I had never thought that they could be this cruel. Such things did not generally happen on Daza land. I did not think of my people as being cruel – or perhaps we were only cruel when we absolutely had to be. If a Souda stole, they were given a chance to make amends. If they did it again, they were driven from tribal lands. If a Souda had nothing – if by some calamity or ill health they could no longer hunt or weave or plant – then we would look after them. There were always many ways to be a part of the village, after all, and we were stronger together. The idea of casting people away because of bits of paper seemed strange and ugly to my heart. But I had not grown up as Inyene and Abioye had, being used and seeing others as tools to profit by.
She uses all of the people around her just like she uses the Daza, I thought. Something made me wonder at that. At just what could make a person so twisted that they couldn’t see just how similar they were.
Montfre was from an unlucky family like she had been, I listed. The Daza are being forced into this ‘debt’, which Inyene knew from a personal experience. It was madness. Sheer madness!
“Pain can be anger,” Ymmen spoke into my mind, and it chimed almost exactly with a saying that my mother had often used.
“Hurt animals growl,” I repeated, earning a strange look from Montfre, that made me go on. “Inyene D’Lia has been so twisted by her experiences that now she’s like a crazed lone wolf.”
Montfre nodded. “Yes, I suppose she is,” he said. “It’s enough to almost make me feel sorry for her. Almost.”
“Apart from the fact she should know better!” I said. “After having gone through the same pain that she is now inflicting on others!” My own four years of torment, and seeing my friends have their health ruined, lose fingers and toes and break bones, would never let me forgive Inyene.